The interesting question now is what exactly is trapped in her head.
I think it’s likely that Siobhan thinks it’s an Abberant. Of course she previously demonstrated an obsessive level of Aberrant knowledge in class — but especially, there’s this quote from 202:
Depending on what they decided her shadow was—though the most obvious conclusion seemed hard to deny—they would only be even more intent on her destruction.
Or whatever it was they really did to Aberrants.
So the question is — who became the Aberrant?
It could be a stranger. The interesting options are that it’s Siobhan herself — a piece of her Will broken off and corrupted — or it’s her mother, kept secure by Raaz after transforming, in a room with a lead door.
Some quotes about The Incident:
Her bare feet passed over the sticky, red, fungus-like tendrils that had crept their way over the stone floor. […] The mirror, a rectangle taller than it was wide, was framed in smoldering brimstone, carved in the shape of twisted and elongated limbs […] Her eyes dragged themselves up to the reflection, which showed not her, but a window looking out over a surreal landscape that had been painted in muted earth tones and fog. In the distance, hunched forms shuffled. As she stared, they became more defined. […] Finally, the smoldering brimstone face at the top of the mirror came into view, bound into the frame. Siobhan tried not to recognize it.
Those glowing amber eyes were familiar, and for a moment, a flash of blood and brain matter pooling out in front of the fire came to mind.
That was followed by a blink-fast vision of an egg with a yolk made of blood.
And then, even faster and on the edge of passing too quickly for her mind to grasp, a doorway filled with hungry sky.
there are a few ways one might describe me. For the moment…I suppose you can consider me a sealed, but not quite forgotten, memory
This wasn’t nearly as bad as the sensory scramble and deep, horrifying wrongness had been when Newton broke, though
A way to somehow strip a being from their body and condense their consciousness into information, then encode it into the form of a memory? Memories are never forgotten, but by breaking all connective bonds of recollection, one could force forgetfulness and thus lock the memory, and the consciousness, away.
Because Grandfather had missed one of her memories, the one he didn’t know she had.
Grandfather had died to save her.
And then the Red Guard had come in and razed the entire village to the ground. They had to, to destroy the infection.
I heard there’s a town near Vale that had a bad Blight-type twenty years ago. The whole town is still trapped inside a sundered zone.”
The words produced a small flutter of actual, physical anxiety in Siobhan’s chest.
[Miakoda] died when Siobhan was young, you said?
She didn’t care about me or little Siobhan anymore, only the magic. I didn’t see ‘er when she died. Kal said it was a mercy. I wouldna’ recognize ‘er corpse…
[He insinuated] you had contact with a Blight-type Aberrant as a child […] When you were a baby, the town near Vale that got encapsulated in a sundered zone. Spalding, I think he said?
The mirror is made of brimstone, and Miakoda was a demon witch who cast magic through her flesh, and whose body Raaz wouldn’t let Ennis see, right around the time there was a Blight-type Aberrant near Vale.
When Siobhan was thirteen the Red Guard had to raze their town, so whatever Aberrant was there didn’t end with her mental sealing. That implies she was just one of many victims, which implies Blight-type too (as do the “tendrils”).
My guess is that Miakoda turned into an Aberrant — the mirror — but Raaz took it and Siobhan to safety and kept it for himself (either under the noses of the Red Guard, or by stealing it afterward). At age thirteen Siobhan snuck into its sealed room, got infected, and started to spread the effect again. The mirror Aberrant propagated by creating a malevolent split personality of the person themself. Siobhan went to Raaz for help, and he sealed away her evil copy — somehow dying in the process. My guess there would be that he killed himself to stop his infection-copy from killing Siobhan. After all, he died sitting in a chair, his head having exploded.
Regarding her splitting her Will, she didn’t actually split it into two effects plus the shadow, did she? I think whatever happened to allow her to split her Will is inherent, due to the Aberrant effect she experienced, and not something actively aided by the sealed memory itself.
Though it’s also possible it’s her bloodline.
Perhaps the Naughts had managed to slip through the cracks, the secrecy of the People keeping them out of modern records, maintaining their abilities through careful breeding, or even inbreeding.
Or, perhaps the Blood Emperor’s experiments had not been so fruitless, after all.
This changed everything.
Raaz Kalvidasan, Siobhan Naught’s adopted grandfather, may have had some connection to the Third Empire’s cohort.
I cannot think of any living mortal species that can truly multitask. It is said that the brillig could, but they didn’t interbreed with humans, and they are all long gone, now. Myrddin was almost certainly a full-blooded human.
It’s possible that Siobhan is part-Brillig, part-Null. Innate affinity to magic, combined with an innate resistance to it? Sounds like something a Third Empire survivor would be interested in. With all the theorizing about The People and the Naught side, I wonder what’s in Ennis’ bloodline? We know he’s truly her father-by-blood. Then again, I think the mirror-Aberrant-encounter is a more likely cause for a Will-splitting ability.
